This blog post is intended for people who refer to gene symbols or names in databases such as Gene, ClinVar, or PubMed. There is a similar post for chemical names and symbols.

During the research and publishing process, scientists need to refer to their genes-of-interest. However, different labs sometimes use different gene symbols to refer to the same gene. As you can imagine, this leads to confusion.

To standardize the use of terms, the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) sets official gene symbols and names. The NCBI Gene resource reports these official gene symbols and names, as well as additional symbols and names that are included on related sequence records for the same gene or from submitted GeneRIFs.

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About the NCBI

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, provides access to scientific and biomedical databases, software tools for analyzing molecular data, and performs research in computational biology.